I'm surprised the flock cameras aren't being disabled in a more subtle fashion.
All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense.
A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act.
Obviously not advocating this, just pointing out that flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack from activists.
The goal here by activists isn't to directly physically disarm every camera. Like with any act of protest, it's at least as much about the optics and influence of public opinion. Visibly destroying the units is more cathartic and spreads the message of displeasure better. Ultimately what needs to change is public perception and policy.
If it's about sending a message, I think using a drone to defeat mass surveillance is quite evocative.
Yes. It will invoke the state to pass even more draconian laws surrounding useful technology.
You want to evoke the people and not the state.
There has been a pattern in the UK of destroying speed cameras for the same reasons - including in some cases throwing an old car tire around the pole and setting it on fire.
Seems to be getting more popular [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/antiulez-campaigners-v...].
Those are not "speed" cameras, they're to enforce daily payment (or fines) for driving in "Ultra Low Emissions Zone" areas in non-compliant vehicles. The area covers all 32 London Boroughs, around 1,500 km² (580 square miles), - affecting approximately 9 Million people.
Destroying speed cameras, especially the tire method, in the UK far predates ULEZ.
Sure, but por que no los dos.
One or two cameras getting bashed is basically a fart in the wind for flock, and I'd argue that it doesn't actually move the needle in any direction as far as public opinion goes. Those who dislike them don't need further convincing, those who support them are not going to have their opinion changed by property destruction (it might make them support surveillance more, in fact).
But hey, it's provocative I guess.
On the other hand flock losing their entire fleet is an existential problem for them, and for all the customers they're charging for the use of that fleet. Their BoD will want answers about why the officers of the company are harming shareholders with the way they're operating the business. Cities that have contracts with them may have grounds to terminate them, etc etc.
That poor printer in Office Space…
It had it coming.
I dream of the day they ALL get their due.
Why would I fly an expensive drone close to a camera, fumble about for a minute trying to get it painted like a renaissance artist, when I can get a paintball gun for much less?
Or use a powerful enough laser pointer. Bonus points if you use infrared since other humans can't see the beam and won't know what you're up to.
Though you either need a laser powerful enough to harm human eyes or lots of patience. Hong Kong protesters innovated a lot of these sort of resistance using lasers
> Bonus points if you use infrared since other humans can't see the beam
But how would you see it? IR goggles?
IR camera but if the beam is powerful enough it could in theory use a few bursts in rapid succession from a roof mount on a generic looking vehicle with the plates covered. Not suggesting anyone try such things but the camera is not guaranteed to catch the location of the busts.
Any cheap camera with the IR filter removed from the lens. Some better than others.
So you can do it without your image being captured by the camera?
The camera doesn't have a 360 field of vision, besides COVID masks aren't uncommon now.
Where I am (Sydney Australia) we have fixed speed cameras that automatically create speeding fines to drivers going too fast (well, technically the registered owner of the vehicle via ANPR).
They eventually had to equip pretty much every speed camera with a speed camera camera, usually on a much higher pole to make vandalism more difficult.
Reminds me of the story about Aeroflot (Soviet National airline) and hijackings
- Aeroflot flights get hijacked and flown to West Berlin
- Soviets decided to put Spetsnaz (Soviet special forces) on the planes much like we have Air Marshals today
- Spetsnaz figures "we have guns and are on the plane already" so they start hijacking flights
- So Soviets put TWO Spetsnaz teams on the flight
- Team 1 decides to hijack flight, realize there is a Team 2 who ALSO agrees to hijack the flight
Which Aeroflot flights were hijacked and flown to West Berlin? I've never heard of this. Funny though that Windows Copilot believes this happened and says that:
"On December 12, 1978, two Soviet citizens hijacked an Aeroflot Yak‑40 on a domestic route and forced it to fly to West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, which was under U.S. control."
But then, when asked about any reference to this event, gives this:
"1. LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 (30 August 1978) A LOT Tupolev Tu‑134 was hijacked by East German citizens seeking asylum and forced to land at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin."
Are you an AI?
I once called my Dad out about Chinese nationalists setting bombs on ships in the 60s. He reckoned his ship had come to the rescue of one where they'd found a bomb and the command crew had posed with it for a photo and it had gone off, killing or wounding all the crew capable of actually navigating the ship.
No mention on Wikipedia of these terrorist activities, nothing in the history I could find online. He was a bit of a tall tale teller so I called him out on it.
He was quite upset and ended up showing me his ship log book. With the ship name and the rough date, I actually found two news articles that had been scanned by Google scholar conforming that it had really happened.
I bet there's a lot we don't know that happened behind the iron curtain, I wouldn't doubt this just because you can't easily find any references with a quick Google.
If you want the rest of how they saved the ship, they tried to get a junior officer over in a sort of swing. If they'd have succeeded they'd have actually all been entitled to a salvage payment. But it was too rough so in the end they just got the other ship to follow them back to port.
When the pilot came out to dock the ship, he found another bomb.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1734&dat=19661114&id=F...
West Berlin was a part of Germany under US/UK/French occupation, I have not heard anybody referring to it as being "behind the iron curtain" before. What would be the reason for the above countries to completely erase multiple hijackings of Aeroflot planes from history? While still popularizing other hijackings, to the point of making a Hollywood movie about the LOT flight I've mentioned [1]. And why the Soviet Union would have joined the West in this conspiracy, while being open about other hijackings (mostly attempted)?
The story is ridiculous on its face: why fly to West Berlin where you'd need to get another flight to get anywhere? The popular targets of hijackers in the USSR were Turkey, Israel and Sweden. "Spetsnaz" is not some organization, it's just an abbreviation of "special designation" similar to English "spec-op", multiple military and law enforcement organizations have their own specnaz as they had in the USSR. Aeroflot was not one of them though, its flights were protected by the "air militia" - a department of the Ministry of the Interior, which was also in charge of the airports security. And, judging by multiple hijacking attempts, there were rarely armed agents on the plane or they rarely decided to engage, which makes sense, since fights on a flying plane would put lives of all passengers into mortal danger. Putting TWO teams of armed soldiers on each plane is something only an LLM could hallucinate in my humble opinion.
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095415
So pandaman is good and mattmanser is part of the same AI slop disinformation campaign as alexpotato. Got it.
That sounds like a typical kind of Soviet genre of joke; Like the guy leaving the breadline in disgust to go kill Gorbachev, but he comes back when he finds that line is even longer...
This will never be a thing in America. Good luck putting the camera on a pole higher than a redneck can shoot a rifle.
Sounds like a new remit for the NRO. Park a billion dollar satellite over an area to keep an eye out for petty vandalism. Then the sheriffs office can team up with Space Force: papers will be served immediately by LEO MIRV deployment, which may also count as execution depending on visibility and aim on the day.
/s - but it wouldn't surprise me at the rate things are going.
We've already got this and it's maybe more capable than you'd think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
I just have to say: this whole thread is great absurd comedy - I don't think I have laughed at something on HN that much before :).
https://www.wsfa.com/2026/02/07/police-use-drone-technology-...
will you stop giving these folks ideas on how to spend more tax payers money?
/s (but not really)
In the mid-2000s the company I worked for in Glasgow fitting microwave links to buildings (broadband wasn't readily available outside cable TV aerials) had a pile of ODUs that had been shot off roofs.
Mostly from one particularly benighted area, Easterhouse. If you extensively gentrified Easterhouse back then, it would look like Detroit in the 90s. It's improved a little since then.
We already have speed cameras Al over NYC. Often the posted speeds there are 25 leading to some absurd tickets.
That's what you get for not having rednecks with rifles
1. Shooting rifles in an urban area sounds like a great way to go to prison.
2. As of 2026, most rednecks seem to be all for the police state. Don't expect them to come save you.
Oof, I really hate this automated enforcement. Might be time to get a paintball gun.
Also here:
"In NSW, paintball is classified as a "prohibited firearm" under the Firearms Act 1996. However, it can still be legally played under strict licensing conditions. Unlike in some states where it is more loosely regulated, players and operators in NSW must comply with a range of legal requirements to ensure safety and legality."
These rules have changed, I think back before COVID they reclassified them as sporting equipment instead of firearms, but still brought in a whole bunch of licensing rules and requirements similar to gun ownership.
You can't just walk into KMart and walk out with a paintball gun here. |Or paintball markers.
I remember reading about that back in the 90s as a kid here in the USA, in Action Pursuit Games magazine. They said semi-automatic paintball guns were illegal in Australia. I was like what kind of hellhole dystopia is that? Meanwhile at the local paintball field I remember this hillbilly had a fully automatic Angel when they came out. (The first electronic paintball gun.) He walked over to the treeline and emptied a hopper full of Brass Eagle paintballs into a tree in like 5 seconds. They all hit the tree at the exact same spot and vaporized into pink mist. Freedom, baby.
> I was like what kind of hellhole dystopia is that?
Cynical answer: Not the kind of hellhole dystopia that has schoolkids shooting up schools twice a week.
How’s the surf at Bondi?
So your thesis is that this hillbilly was likely to take his fully automatic paintball gun and shoot up a school with it?
Or that his possession and use of this gun might somehow serve as a sort of "gateway drug" to Harder Weapons that he would then use to the same end?
Neither one appears to have actually happened. In fact, I've never known a single person who has been involved in a school shooting, or heard of one happening here at all, ever. It just doesn't happen, regardless of whatever is supposedly happening on the glowing box in the corner of everyone's living room that's always portraying doom and danger everywhere.
Indeed, I don't recall a single one of my paintball playing friends (who all nonchalantly used illegal in Australia and super dangerous semi-automatic paintball guns against each other) who later went on to be involved in any kind of gun related incident.
I'm sure you've got some kind of excellent response prepared however, so we will now hear the details of how wrong I am and how Paintball Guns Are In Fact Really Dangerous Because Reasons And the Australian Government Nannies Are Right.
And this is the reason I can’t wait for self driving cars that just follow the speed limit.
They are said to drive like your Grandma, if she was a very good driver....
> Might be time to get a paintball gun
Just wait until you find out that paintball guns are considered firearms are require licensing in the aforementioned region.
I played paintball in Australia and I just had to sign a normal waiver about them not being responsible for injuries
Ownership of paintball guns is regulated under the state-level firearms act in most (all?) states and territories.
You can use them under the direct supervision of the licensed owner, but it's still quite restrictive. If you were to take one and shoot at cameras on the street it would vandalism plus firearms offences, most of which start at inversion of innocence, massive fines and move pretty quickly into prison time.
That's crazy
If you actually purchased one yourself in Queensland, you would need a Cat A firearms license, genuine reason, permit to acquire, safe storage etc as for a firearm.
NSW used to be similar, but a few years ago the state government had a rare moment of common sense and did away with most of that pointless bullshit.
What else could make life safer at a realistic cost for people outside of vehicles?
Urban planning that separates pedestrians and vehicles.
Roads that are narrow in places where a lower speed is desirable.
Heavy taxation on vehicles with more mass and lower visibility.
Actual licensing standards other than driving down a couple of city streets and parking.
More crossings, with lights or bridges, instead of long four-lane arterial roads with nowhere to safely cross.
We have most of that in <pick some European city/country>, and the statistics show it makes a big difference compared to the USA, but drivers still exceed the speed limit, run through red lights etc and cause injuries and death to pedestrians and cyclists.
Removing automatic enforcement of speed limits would not improve the situation.
Where I live, the speed limit keeps getting reduced so the city can make money off of fines, especially because nobody follows speed limits that are ridiculously low for wide, straight roads where following the limit would make traffic ground to a halt.
This happened in my hometown. Arterial roads that were 40mph when I was a kid are posted at 25 today and they just passed legislation to make the automated speed cameras near school zones active 24/7.
Tbh an overpowered laser off alibaba probably works a lot better at longer range
A paintball gun might not invoke the federal government to hunt you down; an over-powered laser absolutely will. The FAA has a very low tolerance for that sort of thing. Do not ever, ever, ever use lasers in open air that are capable of damaging the human retina without the appropriate licenses. The last thing cities need right now is another federal agency going on a witchhunt. Firing eye-damaging lasers into the air would just serve them that excuse on a silvered platter.
The CCDs in cameras can be damaged with low-power lasers, or so I thought. No need for anything crazy. And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward. Pointing them across the street, or anywhere not visible from the air isn't going to sic federal agencies on you.
> And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward.
The point here is that 'skyward' is where the laser's beam goes when you're trying to aim it at a camera up on a pole. It's practically impossible to point a non-fixed position laser at something a non-trivial distance higher than you without spilling a large amount of laser beam into whatever happens to be behind your intended target; which is very often the sky.
When Flock helps you lay out camera placements they make sure camera pairs are facing each other.
If you want to hit the lens with the paintball gun, wouldn't you need to be in its field of vision?
It depends if its field of vision is 180° or 10°.
The wind could curve the ball around slightly.
Drones with a paintball gun attached?
Realistically that’s going to attract a lot of negative attention.
The use of a drone also ups the ante from a prosecutor’s perspective. Charging a vandal caught with a paintbrush and a ladder is nothing out of the ordinary. A routine misdemeanor.
Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.
Yeah like we gotta be serious here, US cops and courts are out to screw people over because that is how they increase their budget, pay, and bonuses. If they think they can twist some law into giving you a felony, they will, regardless of the spirit of the law.
Attaching any kind of potential weapon on a drone has no real precedent so they can dig through 19th century law and combine it with some 21st century law and punishment and screw your life over with bull crap unless you got $100K+ sitting around to throw on a good lawyer. The risk of being caught may be a bit lower, but the potential punishment if caught could be absolutely enormous.
Plus now you're technically arming an aircraft with something, and that might piss off the feds a little bit.
Also, you are dropping something from the aircraft which is a different violation (even if it is moving at 100m/s horizontally while falling at 9.8m/s²).
Just use the drone to spray something on the camera that will etch the glass or destroy the plastic beyond repair.
About ten years ago a company started fitting CCTV cameras to the illuminated advertising hoardings in bus stops, initially to discourage vandalism and then using frankly fucking creepy targetted advertising that used fairly crude machine vision stuff to guess the demographic of people at the stop.
The advertiser's operators could actually look through the camera and shout through hidden speakers at people vandalising their adverts, usually by writing on the specially-coated toughened vandal-resistant glass that ink or paint didn't stick to.
The local wee wannabe gangsters took to filling bingo markers with the stuff they use to etch frosted glass, and tagging the displays with that.
I don’t think they make commercial paintballs with hard to remove enamel or tempura paints.
Sounds like a business opportunity... Permanent marking paintballs...
True but maybe you can fill them yourself?
Filling paintballs is very hard and specialized and would probably be limiting to 99 out of 100 people if not more.
Gluing two fragile gelatin halves (designed to dissolve and break easily) once you’ve filled them perfectly full of paint and then making sure they’re almost perfectly round takes specialized equipment.
Syringe out the old paint, syringe in the new paint.
Mitch Altman should make a "Flock-B-Gone".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV-B-Gone
Palantir makes a nice Vandal-B-Gone product too. Works a treat for linking vandals to Flock camera crime incidents.
Why get an expensive paintball gun when you can get a mask and a can of paint and a mask for much less?
You also need a high ladder.
Humans are just evolved monkeys. Climb the thing. Go ape.
Sorry to let you down but my arms have forgotten their ape lineage.
Last I heard, putting a glock on a quadcopter was creating an "illegal weapon system" or similar fancy sounding BS but I wonder what the accusation would be for a paintball gun on a drone?
Must less recoil too.
I don't think there's a drone in this proposal.
On the list of "laws you don't want to screw with", National Firearms Act violations are high on my list. Regardless of whether something is or isn't a violation, I'm certainly not interested in paying expensive lawyers to argue they're not.
You want to fly a multi-hundred dollar device loaded with radios that constantly broadcasts out a unique ID and possibly your FAA ID and use it for crime?
Or even better yet, get arrested halfway to trying to dip your drone into paint on a sidewalk?
Just throw a rock at the stupid thing.
In 1950s UK every country kid had a catapult in their pocket. Maybe that is what we should do. Give the kids catapults and tell them not to use them on Flock cameras. That is usually effective at making kids so stuff
I was thinking the same thing, much cheaper than a paintball gun, and less conspicuous.
A well made catapult in the right hands with a good aim is deadly.
You mean a slingshot?
(Or a trebuchet?)
in the UK a catapult [catty] is a slingshot.
Omg is that where the name comes from. In my language it's a "kettie".
Do all drones do this now? Is this required by law for manufacturers to implement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_ID in the US (FAA) at least.
Had a friend who worked on designing systems to pick these signals up around airports
Drones over 250 grams or for any drone operated commercially under part 107 registration is required. But, its easy to just build your own or desolder the id chip if you dont want it.
It’s easy to build your own, but it’s impossible to build one to be as stable as a DJI one, or as cheaply. E.g. with an FPV drone hitting the lens would be much harder (but you could use spray instead of a stick to make it easier). Removing remote id ‘chip’ is plain impossible since it’s implemented by the same radio that does video link.
>All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint.
This must be the most hi-tech solution to a low tech problem I've seen this week ;)
Somewhat related, I'm pretty sure there was a guy in China who did exactly this as protest against their surveillance. Seems effective.
I wouldn’t suggest doing that, it will result in more regulation restricting drones. I joined before few workshops that included the government too, and there were discussions about requiring a whole license every time you modify the drone, not limited to the airframe, but the flight purpose and payload. So you can imagine in the future, modding or repurposing your drone could be a “federal crime” if you don’t go and re-license the drone every time you change the payload.
> A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act
No, that would likely end in a RICO or terrorism case if it continued. Just because the cameras aren't destroyed doesn't mean CorpGov won't want to teach a lesson.
Why wouldn’t you advocate it? A much easier way of doing this is using paintballs with the appropriate paint.
> Why wouldn’t you advocate it?
Because advocating things which are moral/ethical but illegal is often against the TOS :(
We need laws which are explicitly based on moral principles. Barring that, we should at least have laws which treat sufficiently large platforms as utilities and forbid them from performing censorship without due process.
You think we should give people being moderated on a forum due process? How would we ever run forums if every contentious and necessary moderation action could lead to a 5k-50k legal bill.
...How can we run a government when every contentious and necessary moderation leads to a 5k-50k legal bill?
Oh wait... Maybe that's the problem.
That would be detectable by the FAA and they would send the FBI after you, unless you used a junk toy drone but that would not cover much distance between charges.
In Minecraft it’s well known that lasers of even moderate power can ruin camera sensors. Only in Minecraft though.
Reflections are a concern regarding bystanders' eye safety, be safe.
What is the threshold for eye vs sensor damage and am I correct in assuming that duration is a factor. Basically less juice for a longer duration ruins a sensor but humans blink? For science.
I picked up an Axis security camera rated for ALPR use (the Q1700 series) and it has a safety warning telling me I shouldn't look at the built in IR LEDs for more than a minute...
LIDAR has been screwing up traffic cameras.
You can put a garbage bag over them if you don’t want to sawzall the pole and dispose of the hardware.
What you want is for this to become a Tiktok craze.
Because destroying them sends a different message. People want them gone, not merely disabled. They're not joking or messing around with drones and tempera about it. Using a firearm to wreck the camera lens before tearing the whole thing down would be nice though.
Shooting them with a paintball gun might be a lot simpler and has the same effect. Just needs paint that's a bit harder to remove
The should disable them all in an area and pile them on a platter in a public space. Like a CiCi's takeover.
Silly string is fast, cheap, easy, and fun when it freezes onto the camera in colder environments.
Maybe some spray foam?
Seems like it would produce a lot of litter on the ground before covering up the lens adequately.
Goring them is about sending a message.
> soaked with tempera paint Or even etching liquid, then you need to replace the lens.
“All it takes is a tiny drone”
Alright you buy one for me and I’ll consider it
The point of civil disobedience is to get arrested. That's what calls attention to the injustice of the thing being protested against.
The point of resistance is commonly to harm the counterparty in a fashion that the perpetrator finds morally acceptable such as to disincentivize them not convince them.
Vietnamese vs US Grunts not cute useless protestors holding signs that threaten to hold different signs longer.
You're both partially right, and that highlights the difference between nonviolent and violent resistance. You are incorrect in saying that a resistance is always trying to disincentivize the counterparty. Even in your example, the NVA didn't overrun their counterparty (the US military); they convinced enough of the US voting public (which is very much a separate entity from the US military) that "Peace with honor" was a viable, preferable option.
>All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense
Americans don’t care enough
Too busy enjoying S&P500 near 7,000 and US$84,000/year median household income
> All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint
I (EDIT: hate) Flock Safety cameras. If someone did this in my town, I’d want them arrested.
They’re muddying the moral clarity of the anti-Flock messaging, the ultimate goal in any protest. And if they’re willing to damage that property, I’m not convinced they understand why they shouldn’t damage other property. (More confidently, I’m not convinced others believe they can tell the difference.)
Flock Safety messages on security. Undermining that pitch is helpful. Underwriting it with random acts of performative chaos plays into their appeal.
> flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack
We live in a free society, i.e. one with significant individual autonomy. We’re all always very vulnerable. That’s the social contract. (The fact that folks actually contemplating violent attacks tend to be idiots helps, too.)
Oh no! Not property damage! We can't possibly go that far!
> Not property damage! We can't possibly go that far!
Anyone can go that far. The question is if it’s smart. The answer is it’s not. Acting out one’s need for machismo on a good cause is just selfish.
If I were a Flock PR person, I’d be waiting for someone to pull a stunt like this. (Better: they shoot it.)
> I haste Flock Safety cameras.
Was this a typo? If not, what does "haste" mean in this context? (I'm not messing with you; I'm genuinely wondering.)
It was a typo. Fixed.
Oh please. Its tempera paint. It'll probably wash off in the next rain.
> Its tempera paint. It'll probably wash off in the next rain
If they do it right. If they don’t, it doesn’t. And between the action and the next rain, Flock Safety gets to message about vandalism.
You're assuming that that "message" would persuade anybody.
It'd be more likely to make more people do it.